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31

General Discussion / Re: [Uber-Spoilers] Hypershunt Tap Acquisition

« on: April 01, 2021, 04:13:03 PM »

There's an item that you can salvage, just like all the other lost tech stuff (like nanoforges).

Adds demand for 10 units of Transplutonics. If met, +1 max industries, must be within 10 LY of the Hypershunt. (installed in population + infrastructure).

But yeah, it could be clearer.

32

General Discussion / Re: Complaints about CR and game design

« on: April 01, 2021, 04:01:41 PM »

I think deploying your massive battleship to kill 1 frigate loses its fun value very quickly. You can do some 'fun' things once or twice, even if it isn't optimal, but while I smirk when my Paragon absolutely deletes a Kite, the game would not be better if that's all you did -- chew up outmatched opponents.

If you don't find it fun, then don't do it? That's no reason to support taking it away from people who do enjoy it. This right here would be the "screw you, I got mine" attitude I mentioned.

I mean... nothing stops you from doing it other than the supply cost. If you have the supplies to do it... just do it? There's plenty of 'fun' things in games that are not exactly optimal. Committing crimes in TES games like Skyrim? Probably not optimal, but plenty of fun. Is that what the game is about? No.

The game wants you to accurately estimate what it will take to win a battle. If you want to spend a bit more for a more secure victory, you can do that. To use a RL example, the US does not deploy a carrier group to deal with piracy off the African coast, when a few ships will do the job.

I know, but that's exactly my complaint. That's the one playstyle the game pushes you into. If you happen to like that playstyle, good for you, but the game could be so much more than just this.

Not to mention that it's not actually possible to make that estimation accurately due to the dumb AI and lack of command points issues I mentioned.

There's been a lot of mitigation around the cost of losing a ship so that even if you guess wrong, the punishment isn't so severe. Ability to passively remove D-mods, ability to build your own ships, more ability to recover own ships, etc. Yeah, I'd love if the AI was a bit smarter at times, but fixing that issue is a very difficult problem. The punishment for losing a ship is not nearly as bad as it used to be. Is good now? Debatable.

"Nothing stops you, unless something does." Good one. More to the point, there is indeed something that stops you, deployment points. Since you don't get your DP back when you retreat a ship, there's a hard cap on how many ships you can deploy. And in that case it's better to deploy them all at once.

This is just wrong, you get DP back when you retreat a ship.

Yes, I suppose you can still do that, but if the dev's comments on it are any indication, the nerf bat is rapidly approaching this particular strategy's face.

Yes, but at that point you run into this issue here: http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=20344.0

Yeah, but at this point, it's no longer in the scope of this discussion and more about 'what issues still exist in Starsector?'. Late game balance isn't great right now. I agree there. The junker strategy needs better balance than "here's some unkillable ships because reasons." But CR and spending supplies is not really a lategame problem unless you want to talk about chain battles, which seems to be a Nexerelin issue more than a vanilla one (how many times do you really get forced into more than 2 back to back battles in vanilla?)

At the end of the day, you are always going to want more features, more options, more everything, but there's only so much that can be done, especially with such a small team.

33

General Discussion / Re: Complaints about CR and game design

« on: April 01, 2021, 12:34:58 PM »

It's bad game design to have an optimal strategy that's boring, and then expect players to not do the optimal strategy. Sid Meyers also mentions that "one of the responsibilities of designers is to protect the player from themselves". The optimal strategy should be fun.

That's my point exactly. "I should hold back because deploying my awesome big battleship will eat too many supplies" may be optimal but it's not fun. I worked hard to get that battleship, dammit! Being able to curb stomp some small fry with it is part of the reward for all that effort, but the game discourages it because it's not optimal.

I think deploying your massive battleship to kill 1 frigate loses its fun value very quickly. You can do some 'fun' things once or twice, even if it isn't optimal, but while I smirk when my Paragon absolutely deletes a Kite, the game would not be better if that's all you did -- chew up outmatched opponents.

The problem with autoresolve is that it promotes skipping the 'fun' part of Starsector, the combat. You already have autoresolve for pursuits (which generally does better than actually playing it out, I find...), which prevents the classic autoresolve issue of 'your invincible unit randomly decided to commit suicide in this battle... somehow', or Total War's 'higher difficulty = super imbalanced autoresolve so it's a trap to press the button'. Starsector is still heavily a space combat game. The space combat is IMO the best part about Starsector. It doesn't make too much sense to promote skipping the space combat in Starsector.

Forcing the player to fight battles also promotes fighting fairer battles. Instead of just picking smaller fleets to constantly autoresolve against, it promotes actually finding more challenging battles, since it's a better use of time.

Eh... combat is the main source of fun in Starsector, that's true, but that doesn't mean every battle is fun or worth fighting manually. Starsector tries to get around that with the CR and supply mechanic, by pushing you toward making those fights more challenging for yourself. But that kinda makes it feel like a self-imposed challenge rather than overcoming a real challenge, and a lot of people (myself included, obviously) aren't into that. So they don't do it, take the CR hit, and then complain that CR is annoying. You could say that that's my own fault and that I'm playing the game wrong, and I'd respond that the dev failed in his responsibility to protect me from myself as per Sid Meier's words.

There's this weird incongruity that is difficult to put into words. It's as if the game doesn't know whether it wants to be stat-based or skill-based. Where does player power come from in Starsector, stats or skills? The management aspects of the game point toward stat-based: you scavenge and trade to get cash, you establish colonies, you accrue a large fleet, outfit it with big guns, staff it with officers, etc. When it comes to deployment, the game discourages you from using the power you've accumulated and instead pushes you to fight on equal footing, as if it were skill-based. But when it comes to the actual battle itself, most of your power is in AI ships that you have very little control over compared to more conventional strategy games, so the game has switched to stat-based again. Except you don't have your stats, because you held back in deployment. The game discourages you from using your stats to win (because if you do, you waste CR), and it doesn't allow you to use your skills either (because you can barely control other ships, and your own keels over and dies after a few minutes). The dev doesn't understand what fantasy the game caters to; being able to assemble a large fleet of awesome warships is a power fantasy, but then the game punishes you for using that power and tries to make you struggle and scrape by anyway as if it's some kind of survival game.

The game wants you to accurately estimate what it will take to win a battle. If you want to spend a bit more for a more secure victory, you can do that. To use a RL example, the US does not deploy a carrier group to deal with piracy off the African coast, when a few ships will do the job.

As far as player vs fleet ability, this is where skills, officers, and all the other stuff combines to (hopefully) make interesting choices. Nothing stops you from going with a chain flagship strategy, if it still works, where you deploy 1 ship until it starts running out of CR, then you deploy the next and transfer command, etc. You can also go with the other side of it now, with Derelict Contingent and try to flood the field with crappy ships that have relatively low supply costs to maintain. If you have actually reached the point where you have a big fleet with officers, then you are probably also at the point where an extra 100 supplies per battle is no longer a serious concern, especially now that you can back your fleet up with a strong economic base from colonies. I can't say I'm the biggest fan of how the skills are set up now, but the ideas are there. Combat = you are stronger, Leadership = Officers are stronger (and it seems carriers as well?), Technology = Ships are stronger, Industry = You have more stuff/your campaign layer is stronger.

I think Alex understands his game and setting very well. The Hegemony and Persean League are not first rate powers, having the latest and greatest in technology, with well defined fleet doctrines and strategies. Instead, they are just the biggest fish in the pond, clinging to the scraps of what the Domain left behind. Everyone is just trying to get ships together that work.
As a player, you are trying to assemble your super awesome fleet, but there's significant hurdles in your way, which is the game. It's perfectly achievable, it's rather trivial to set up 3-4 colonies to earn 500k+/month. Once you have that, you basically don't have to care about CR, just take like 2 Atlases and 2 Prometheis full of supplies and fuel, since the credit cost is immaterial at that point. However, the game is IMO best when taking the journey to reach the 'optimal' fleet, not when you actually achieve it.

Project Ironclads was the TC mod that catered more towards the idea of what you mention, and it did a good job of it. But it was different from Starsector, which is why it was best as a TC.

34

General Discussion / Re: Complaints about CR and game design

« on: March 31, 2021, 09:17:07 PM »

Players love to optimize gameplay. The classic saying is that 'players will optimize the fun out of the game'. If you can solo every fleet in the game with a solo Hyperion, there will probably be people that do exactly that. It might be fun to do once, or a few times, but not something people want to do repeatedly.

I mean, if it's not fun for you, then don't do it? Seems a simple enough solution to me. And if someone does do it repeatedly, then it must be fun for them. Why take it away from them when that removal doesn't benefit you in any way, since you wouldn't do it even if you could?

Uhh... you brought up game design in the title of this post. It's bad game design to have an optimal strategy that's boring, and then expect players to not do the optimal strategy. Sid Meyers also mentions that "one of the responsibilities of designers is to protect the player from themselves". The optimal strategy should be fun.

On the other hand, if there was no supply cost to deploy my entire fleet, then when I'm facing a weaker fleet, I'll just deploy the whole fleet, alt tab, come back to the victory screen. Fun. Might as well add autoresolve at that point.

Yes, might as well. There's a lot of games that have it, like Mount&Blade, Total War, and many others. There's a good reason for that, forcing the player to fight every single battle makes the game tedious and unfun. Making the player limit their own power is even worse. What's the point of having progression, of acquiring more and better ships with bigger guns, if the game is going to artificially enforce parity with weaker enemies anyway? Starsector doesn't even have the decency to just scale the enemies to match you like most games do, instead it makes you hold back with a threat of punishment. That just feels extremely unsatisfying and is part of the general problem of using negative motivation to push the player into doing something that's not enjoyable.

The problem with autoresolve is that it promotes skipping the 'fun' part of Starsector, the combat. You already have autoresolve for pursuits (which generally does better than actually playing it out, I find...), which prevents the classic autoresolve issue of 'your invincible unit randomly decided to commit suicide in this battle... somehow', or Total War's 'higher difficulty = super imbalanced autoresolve so it's a trap to press the button'. Starsector is still heavily a space combat game. The space combat is IMO the best part about Starsector. It doesn't make too much sense to promote skipping the space combat in Starsector.

Forcing the player to fight battles also promotes fighting fairer battles. Instead of just picking smaller fleets to constantly autoresolve against, it promotes actually finding more challenging battles, since it's a better use of time.

35

General Discussion / Re: Complaints about CR and game design

« on: March 31, 2021, 05:43:32 PM »

I feel like CR is necessary, or at least a similar mechanic.

Players love to optimize gameplay. The classic saying is that 'players will optimize the fun out of the game'. If you can solo every fleet in the game with a solo Hyperion, there will probably be people that do exactly that. It might be fun to do once, or a few times, but not something people want to do repeatedly. On the other hand, if there was no supply cost to deploy my entire fleet, then when I'm facing a weaker fleet, I'll just deploy the whole fleet, alt tab, come back to the victory screen. Fun. Might as well add autoresolve at that point. Starsector is fun when you are having to balance decisions like 'can I support adding this ship to my fleet' or 'which ships are best to deploy here?'

Having supply costs and CR allows you to have a risk/reward factor to battles. It's a choice of how much of your fleet you need to deploy to beat a smaller fleet. Do you deploy just your flagship? How many escorts do you need? If you go with the solo flagship, will you run out of PPT and end up costing more supplies recovering CR than if you had just deployed more ships?

SO is balanced around the idea that you are on a clock, your CR will run out faster than your enemies (usually), so you have to be aggressive. You can't just have a SO ship around because it can tank damage, back up quickly, and never die, it needs to actually kill stuff. (Well... you can, but it's not supply efficient).

I've also had some extremely grindy fights where the AI actually runs out of CR before me (in the early game), allowing me to win a battle that I was severely outnumbered. Then it was a moment of 'oh man, how am I going to survive this battle/can I get to a clean disengage' to 'Wow, I actually WON this?' But generally, the player is outnumbered, so they have to worry about CR way more than the AI does (and the AI doesn't need supplies either).

Using XCOM (EU/EW) Long War as an example, one issue was that the optimal strategy in most cases was to creep slowly up the map, spamming overwatch so that you never had a bad pod activation. I guess I didn't play XCOM 2 that much (didn't play LW or even WoTC), but I felt like they went too far in the opposite direction, where strict mission time limits meant that you were rushing around, combined with fairly punishing effects for leaving practically any enemy alive to take a turn.

Personally, I'd love to see more hull mods that interact with CR/PPT/recovery cost, (I know mods add some), such as something for fast frigates with low PPT to capture points quickly (you could use SO + UI for this, but that's a lot of OP when you often just want something quick that can stand its ground against another light ship, then leave the battle when larger ships show up (something like -75% PPT and -50% recovery cost would work). So far, there's just SO, Eff Overhaul, and Hardened Subsystems. Right now, you can argue that Efficiency Overhaul is a trap hull mod, but that's mostly because it's far too easy to make infinite money currently.

36

General Discussion / Re: Making money in the new version is too easy

« on: March 31, 2021, 03:38:31 AM »

After testing, it was fairly trivial to achieve ~10m value (ships + equipment + money) within the first ingame year, starting with the Wolf start. Mostly due to Pirates/Pathers having permanent shortages that don't get solved by the player's black market trade. Almost purely done through trading. Raiding alongside could probably earn even more, but I'm always hesitant to raid the Pirates frequently, because if you do it too much, they decivilize and you kill your golden goose.

37

General Discussion / Re: Making money in the new version is too easy

« on: March 30, 2021, 03:48:19 PM »

Question along the lines of this thread—I’ve downloaded the new patch and a few mods but am busy with work so have limited time to dig through jsons and make edits. Plus I have a hankering to jump in and play. One thing that has bothered me about the recent releases is the massive monthly payments that ostensibly come from the tutorial quest, whether or not it’s skipped. Are these still in the game / do they affect all starts?

Pretty sure the monthly payments are paying your crew wages, and it should only be on the order of ~5-10k early on. If you skip the tutorial, you start with the bonus as if you had completed the tutorial, which is a 15k/month income for 3? years. This should be enough to offset the wages of your crew.

38

Suggestions / Filter Planet by Conditions

« on: March 27, 2021, 12:20:31 AM »

Now that we have items that care about having specific conditions (IE Synchrotron requires No Atmosphere), it would be nice if there was a way on the Intel screen to filter to planets with specific condition(s).

39

General Discussion / Re: Thoughts on Trading

« on: March 19, 2021, 02:55:22 PM »

Having recently come back to the game (last played v0.8 ), I feel like the economy is much better than it was before, but (non-smuggling) trade has never felt particularly viable compared to things like bounty hunting and exploration. The UI improvements and excess/shortage system make commodity trading much easier in terms of figuring out where the opportunities are. So here's my thoughts on the current state of trading:

I believe the following should be true of commodity trading (buying/selling commodities for a profit):

• Trading on the open market should not be profitable under normal conditions

In general agree, i'll give a small caveat on 1, in that "normal trading covering operating costs" doesn't strike me as a terrible idea.

Starsector is somewhat unique compared to other games in the genre in that you have very real operating costs.  The constant bleeding of supplies can feel smothering when you're learning, but as a way to get players to "dip a toe" in trading, it would make sense to have your spare space before you leave filled up with commodities that you can sell for a profit upon landing.

I will say that thinking about it trying to work this into the current system in a way that is elegantly clear, and doesn't just lead to risk averse players "grinding" their creds for an hour is possibly not worth it, but I do think it's at least worth considering.

Right now commodities are just credits in another form, as only volitiles have any other use, and since the econ game is pretty complicated it's not exactly worth the hassle vs just bounty hunting/exploring for your money.  Giving beginners an "in" into the trading system might help.[/list]

I think it makes sense that a lot of trading is not profitable, but quick 'on the side' trading would make sense if the situation is right for it. Places where there is an excess of a resource is a great time to do a bit of trading, I'm usually happy to pick up 100-200 Volatiles at half price to sell somewhere else later.

I think this is something that could be suggested in/at the end of the tutorial (haven't tried it in a while), since IIRC the tutorial ends at Jangala.

Another minor issue I have is that some commodities (mostly Ore, but to a lesser degree, Metals) have such a low base price that it is rarely worth trying to trade significant amounts of them unless the trade is convenient (IE within the system), because you need so much cargo space to make any significant profit. (In the case of Metals, you end up with quite a bit from blowing ships up/salvage, but how often do you actually buy metals from a market?)

40

General Discussion / Re: Thoughts on Trading

« on: March 19, 2021, 11:04:46 AM »

IMO, having the Spaceport disrupted should not result in such a severe access penalty, unless a change is made such that the markets of a planet/station with 0% access or less is not accessible (after all, how do you trade with the planet if none of the AI trade fleets can?). Perhaps just removing the -50% access from not having a spaceport is sufficient.

• Spaceport: removed "No spaceport" accessibility penalty when under construction or disrupted

Hmm... I missed that. That's great!

• Procurement missions contributing to supply (where does it go?), especially if issued during a shortage

I think that already happens (though I believe I was running mods at the time, so I'm not completely sure if this is vanilla), though it depends on who you're doing the mission for. If the mission is from say a quartermaster or some other official, it goes to alleviating the shortage (if there is one), otherwise, nothing happens.

I think this gets a little odd in general, since the price is fixed upon accepting the contract. For example, if there's a shortage of 1000 fuel, and you get a procurement contract for 500 fuel, there's nothing currently stopping you from having 1500 fuel, selling 1000 on the market, then finishing off the contract.

41

General Discussion / Thoughts on Trading

« on: March 19, 2021, 01:51:32 AM »

Having recently come back to the game (last played v0.8 ), I feel like the economy is much better than it was before, but (non-smuggling) trade has never felt particularly viable compared to things like bounty hunting and exploration. The UI improvements and excess/shortage system make commodity trading much easier in terms of figuring out where the opportunities are. So here's my thoughts on the current state of trading:

I believe the following should be true of commodity trading (buying/selling commodities for a profit):

• Trading on the open market should not be profitable under normal conditions
• Trading on the open market, by either buying from an excess, or selling to a shortage, should, under most conditions, be profitable.
• Trading on the black market should be more profitable if done in the same volume as trading on the open market.
• Trading on the black market in high volume should come with significant risks or penalties with non-pirate factions
• Trading on the black market in illegal commodities should be (more easily) profitable than other types of commodity trading, as there are risks to getting caught.
• Significant trading with Pirates (and Pathers) should result in risks and/or penalties (beyond potentially getting attacked by them), even if done with the transponder off.

Currently, tariffs achieve (1) and (3), but are so high that they almost completely block (2) (this has been the case for as long as I've been playing Starsector). Even buying/selling a commodity at a 100% markup, you will only gain 10% of the value of the commodity you traded is (buy at 130%, sell at 140%). This prevents all but the best deals from being profitable on the open market. As a result, all profitable commodity trading takes place on the Black Market, which seems unintuitive for larger volumes of trading. Significantly reducing tariffs to even something as low as 10 or maybe even 5% would still achieve (1) and (3) while actually allowing (2) to become true. Some additional work might be needed to reduce the viability of black market trade in large volumes, but reducing tariffs would be an important step in allowing open market trading to become viable.

(5) continues to be true, as this has been the classic 'smuggler' route, and it works well. (especially as there is almost always a shortage of drugs somewhere or another)

Disruptions caused by lost trade fleets allows small opportunities, and would allow (2) if the tariffs were not so high. However, the big money to be made in commodity trading comes from disrupted spaceports.

Currently, a disrupted Spaceport in a system results in some insane profiteering due to a mix of how the various systems work. A disrupted Spaceport often means access will drop to 0% or less, meaning nothing is getting shipped in or out. This causes massive shortages and excesses across the board on most planets/stations. Since most trade happens on the black market, which does not affect shortages, the shortage continues until the spaceport is fixed. A single planet/station with a disrupted spaceport for a few months can easily result in a million credits of profit in that time period, with almost no risk and only a little reputation loss, without trading in any illegal goods (which can often double the profits).

As an example from a recent new game, Tigra City (size 4, Mining (moderate ore), Spaceport, Orbital Station) got hit in a Pirate raid, disrupting the Spaceport. This resulted in a shortage of 600 supplies, 1000 fuel, 100 heavy machinery, 200 luxury goods, 600 domestic goods, and 1500 organics (and 800 recreational drugs, 200 organs). All of these ended up at about 2x normal price, meaning that every time the shortage reset, there was a profit available of ~175,000 from only buying/selling regular commodities on the black market, almost all of which was easily sourced from planets within the system (meaning I did not need a tremendously large cargo fleet). If you add in the illegal trading, there was a further ~200,000 credits available every shortage reset. This is all from a size 4 colony with just mining and a spaceport. Naturally, this opportunity resulted in me clearing a million credits easily within the first cycle of the game, without any major risks and only the loss of about 10-15 reputation with the Hegemony from scans and trade on the black market. (And it could have been optimized further by turning off my transponder when selling to Tigra City, as no patrols were nearby). This currently means that (4) is not the case, as I am able to carry out high volume black market trading for months at a time, with only minor penalties (I would happily trade 20+ reputation with a faction for a million credits when starting out).

These opportunities are not too uncommon either, as Pirate and Pather bases in the core worlds also occasionally get disrupted by major faction patrols (in addition to successful pirate raids against major factions). As you are trading on the black market with your transponder off (the only way to gain access to a port while hostile to Pirates/Path + no penalties for using the black market), you do not lose any reputation with major factions (when selling to the Pirates/Pathers) for a significant amount of smuggling. As long as you have a few combat ships in your fleet, the small pirate/pather fleets will leave you alone. This goes against (6). These longer-term shortage trading opportunities completely trivialize the early parts of the game, allowing you to basically buy any ship you can find after a few ingame months of trading.

IMO, having the Spaceport disrupted should not result in such a severe access penalty, unless a change is made such that the markets of a planet/station with 0% access or less is not accessible (after all, how do you trade with the planet if none of the AI trade fleets can?). Perhaps just removing the -50% access from not having a spaceport is sufficient. Furthermore, at least a portion of commodities sold on the black market should probably go back to solving shortages on a planet/station. This would significantly reduce the amount of money to be made from these long-term shortages.

Procurement missions and delivery missions are both good, and allow constant trading, even when there are no shortages. Procurement missions issued from a planet/station where there is already a shortage often means just extra profit, as they don't contribute to ending the shortage, and offer an even higher profit margin.

Random related ideas related to trading that I'd love to see in the future (maybe some of these are already coming, or already exist but don't seem to occur for one reason or another):

• Procurement missions contributing to supply (where does it go?), especially if issued during a shortage
• Some sort of investigation system, where there are consequences for trading in high volumes on the black market with a faction continuously. Possibly with bribes to avoid penalties. (related to (4) and maybe (6))
• Significantly more restricted black market commodity trading (limited to lower volumes of buying) at non-free ports without investment of skill/story points (need to source a drug/organ supplier) (somewhat related to (4))
• Procurement missions for Luddic Path cells (Marines/Heavy Armaments/Supplies/Fuel) that can trigger activity, with consequences (potentially similar for pirate procurement missions?)
• Government-related delivery missions for relieving shortages, especially if commissioned

42

Modding / [0.8.1a] Bug with replacing rulecmd scripts in jar file

« on: May 04, 2018, 01:01:25 AM »

Not sure if this belongs in the modded support, since this seems to be a bug related to writing a mod?

I have a replacement for NGCAddStandardStartingScript.java in my (total conversion) mod's jar file, but it does not appear to get called. Instead, the base game's NGCAddStandardStartingScript is getting called.


I am trying to rebuild the sector entirely. I can successfully remove almost all the systems, but Galatia is a minor problem, since it is used by the tutorial and NGCAddStandardStartingScript (and rules.csv). When I remove Galatia from SectorGen (and economy.json), I get the following error:

Code

55054 [Thread-4] ERROR com.fs.starfarer.combat.CombatMain  - java.lang.NullPointerException
java.lang.NullPointerException
	at com.fs.starfarer.api.impl.campaign.rulecmd.NGCAddStandardStartingScript$1.run(NGCAddStandardStartingScript.java:89)
	at com.fs.starfarer.campaign.save.CampaignGameManager.super(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.title.TitleScreenState.dialogDismissed(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.ui.N.dismiss(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.ui.impl.O0oO.dismiss(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.campaign.save.if.actionPerformed(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.ui.supernew.o00000(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.ui.oooO.processInput(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.ui.Stringsuper.o00000(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.BaseGameState.traverse(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.state.AppDriver.begin(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.combat.CombatMain.main(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.StarfarerLauncher$1.run(Unknown Source)
	at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source)

This makes sense, since the code being run in com.fs.starfarer.api.impl.campaign.rulecmd.NGCAddStandardStartingScript.java is as follows:

Code

88					StarSystemAPI system = Global.getSector().getStarSystem("galatia");
89					PlanetAPI ancyra = (PlanetAPI) system.getEntityById("ancyra");

Since I removed Galatia, system is null, so I get a NPE.

However, inside my jar file I have a replacement to com.fs.starfarer.api.impl.campaign.rulecmd.NGCAddStartingStandardScript.java. From my understanding, anything in my jar file should replace the game's version of the file (as data.scripts.world.SectorGen.java gets replaced by my jar file). This does not appear to be the case, since in my modified version of NGCAddStartingStandardScript, line 89 is just a curly brace, and the game keeps crashing with the same error (same line).


My workaround is to create a NGCAddStartingStandardScript2.java, which is an exact copy of my version of NGCAddStartingStandardScript.java, and change my rules.csv to call this instead of NGCAddStartingStandardScript. This is working, which implies to me that NGCAddStartingStandardScript is not getting replaced by my jar file.

I can provide the source files to my mod if needed.

43

Mods / Re: [0.8a]STEELCLAD v0.2 (Ironclads revival) - 21.5.2017

« on: May 25, 2017, 03:25:08 AM »

OK, after turning the AI into the remanant (basically, the remnant variants are part of the AI faction) and the derelict into the alines (the survey ship ship class/group in the faction file actually points to the alien mothership and all the ships variants are also alien ships) the game crashes because it cannot find the "warden" variant.

There is no warden ship in any file anywhere I see. 

The Warden is one of the vanilla Domain drones. See CoreLifecyclePluginImpl, there is a pickShipAI that gives the ship different AI if it is a Domain drone. You can maybe override it, but not exactly sure.

44

General Discussion / Re: .8 feedback thread

« on: May 21, 2017, 02:37:01 PM »

The best way I found to wait for ships is to take procurement missions. Hybrasil has a lot of possibility to get in-system missions, and has a good variety of goods to take out of system. Waiting for the missions/doing them takes a few days, so you can check back once you finish a mission or two.

45

Mods / Re: [0.8a]STEELCLAD v0.1 (Ironclads revival) - 15.5.2017

« on: May 21, 2017, 02:19:18 PM »

It's all confusing.

derelict_survey_mothership seems to be a combat group defined in hte faction file, and in it is the station_derelict_survey_mothership_Standard.variant, itself defined in the stations folder

But rules csv seems to call other things

Code

# Descriptions of automated defenders,,,,,,
sal_printDefaultDefenders,TriggerAutomatedDefenses,,SalvageDefenderInteraction,"As your $shipOrFleet moves in closer, new energy signatures are detected near the $shortName.",,
sal_printDebrisDefenders,TriggerAutomatedDefenses,$customType == debris_field_shared,SalvageDefenderInteraction,"As your $shipOrFleet moves in closer, new energy signatures are detected near a larger pieces of debris.",,
sal_triggerProbeDefenders,TriggerAutomatedDefenses,$customType == derelict_probe,SalvageDefenderInteraction,"As your $shipOrFleet moves in closer, several energy signatures are detected coming online inside the probe's hold.",,
sal_triggerSurveyShipDefenders,TriggerAutomatedDefenses,$customType == derelict_survey_ship,SalvageDefenderInteraction,"As your $shipOrFleet moves in closer, multiple energy signatures are detected coming online from various points on and within the flayed hull of the survey ship.",,
sal_triggerMothershipDefendersBoth,TriggerAutomatedDefenses,"$customType == derelict_mothership
$hasStation

Can't find derelict_probe or derelict_survey_ship defined anywhere in any shape or form.
I'm looking into the Starfarer.api.zip, but still can't find DerelictThemeGenerator or SalvageDefenderInteraction....

Those are defined in custom_entities.json, they refer to the campaign map objects that you interact with.